THE COMREY PERSONALITY-SCALES IN RUSSIAN - A STUDY OF CONCURRENT, PREDICTIVE, AND EXTERNAL VALIDITY

This study was a follow-up to Brief and Comrey (1993; Journal of Perso nality Assessment, 60, 267-284) in which the stability of the factor s tructure of the Comrey Personality Scales (CPS) was investigated for a diverse, Russian sample. Results from that study showed that Comrey's 8-factor personality taxonomy generalized well to the Russian sample and that the CPS dimensions for the Russians were not significantly di fferent from the dimensions reported in samples from six Western natio ns. The purpose of our study was to investigate further the appropriat eness of using the CPS with Russian respondents by looking at the cons truct and external validity of the CPS scales. On the basis of a prior i hypotheses, CPS scale scores were correlated with scores from a numb er of other personality measures and biographical data. In addition, p lanned comparisons were performed (a) between groups of communists and non-communists, (b) among persons holding conservative, reformist, an d revolutionary perspectives concerning the need for societal change, and (c) among high school, undergraduate, and graduate groups. Results showed for the Russian respondents good support for the construct val idity of the scales: Trust, Orderliness, Social Conformity, Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Masculinity, and Response Bias. The Activity and Empathy scales received only moderate support due mainly to the la ck of suitable criterion variables with which to correlate them.